Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

I was good Marine during Vietnam but more importantly I still possess a Liberty Bond from Granma out of WWI, some War Stamps and ration tickets from Mom out of WWII and some two-cent Pepsi empties out of the 1950s.

I may soon desert my wife of forty years, cash in and go nuts on a bender.

I remember purchasing war savings stamps in school. They cost a dime or a quarter and they gave us a book to put them into. $18.75 was needed to purchase a bond that would eventually be worth $25. There probably still are millions of dollars worth of War Savings Bonds & Stamps in attics, safe deposit boxes, mattresses and file cabinets all over the country. Bugs Bunny used to sing "Any Bonds Today."

In 1965, I graduated High School, and with nothing to do for the summer before entering college, my Uncle John, who worked for Coca Cola, got me a summer job working at their Long Island City, NY bottling plant.

At first, I was put to work stacking full cases of Coke (6 across, 6 high) onto a wooden pallet that was loaded by fork lift onto a truck. Eight hours of that was grueling.

If you showed yourself to be a good worker, you were moved to unloading the empty bottles into the bottle washer.

If you were a really hard worker, you were moved onto the bottling line, looking for bottles that were broken or that did not fill completely.

When I was a kid (late 60s/early 70s), the deposit on these bottles was 2 cents. We could usually find enough discarded ones along the road and in parks to turn in at the grocery store and be able to buy candy and/or a balsa wood glider or two.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.